Saturday, June 22, 2013

OpenDJ is getting RESTless!

A very exciting feature of OpenDJ will be released fairly soon. In fact, end of this month with the version 2.6 release.

In OpenDJ 2.6, REST endpoints will be exposed for end-users.

So besides the traditional way of connecting to a directory server via LDAP/LDAPS protocol, one can now connect to OpenDJ via the RESTful interface.

The REST endpoints with the REST2LDAP web application is shipped bundled with OpenDJ server.
By default, it is not enabled. A simple toggle in the configuration will enable the REST endpoints. As simple as that!

If we need to scale the REST2LDAP web application (well, it behaves just like any other web application) to handle high load, the REST2LDAP web application can be deployed in a different node. And of course, multiple REST2LDAP can be deployed pointing back to the same OpenDJ servers.

This is an exciting feature, especially targeted at the modern developers of today who are more REST/JASON savvy.

In addition, when one query for a user in OpenAM, OpenIdM and OpenDJ, there is now a standard way of calling. All REST endpoints in these 3 products from ForgeRock are going to be more or less standardized, which makes development really easy. Oh man, I can finally throw away opendj-ldap-sdk-x.x.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.

You can view the presentation slides from here. And if you can't wait, you can always download the OpenDJ nightly build to try it out!